Title:Does the public discuss other topics on climate change than researchers? A comparison of networks based on author keywords and hashtags

Abstract: Twitter accounts have already been used in many scientometrics studies, but
the meaningfulness of the data for societal impact measurements in research
evaluation has been questioned. Earlier research has compared social media
counts with citations. We explore a novel network approach in which we compare
author keywords to Twitter hashtags as indicators of topics. We analyze the
topics of tweeted publications and compare them with the topics of all
publications (tweeted and not tweeted). Our study is based on a comprehensive
publication set of climate change research. We are interested in whether
Twitter data are able to reveal topics of public discussions which can be
separated from research-focused topics. We find that the most tweeted topics
regarding climate change research focus on consequences for humans due to
climate change. Twitter users are interested in climate change publications
which forecast effects of a changing climate on the agricultural sector. This
includes food production and conservation of forests. The networks based on the
author keywords in both tweeted and not tweeted papers are broader oriented.
Overall, our results show that publications using scientific jargon are less
likely to be tweeted than publications using more general keywords. Our results
do not support the use of Twitter counts for research evaluation purposes.
However, publications that are tweeted can clearly be distinguished from
publications that are not tweeted. Furthermore, the Twitter networks can be
used to visualize public discussions about specific topics.